Books I Didn’t Finish in January 2016

There’s a number books that I started but didn’t finish this month. I don’t want to do full, rated reviews for them, so I’m talking about them all here instead.

I can’t remember exactly how far I made it through Afterworlds before I quit, but it was at least a hundred pages. Afterworlds alternates between Darcy Patel, a teenage girl who’s YA manuscript is slated to be published, and the YA paranormal story that Darcy wrote. I found Darcy’s section boring. There didn’t seem to be any conflict, and she kept making questionable decisions and not feeling any repercussions. As for the paranormal story, YA paranormal romance just isn’t my thing. I might have finished this book anyway, but it was six hundred pages long and I wasn’t willing to put up with it for that length of time.

I made it about halfway through Liesmith by Ali Franklin. I knew going in that it used Norse mythology, there was a romantic relationship between two male characters, and that it was urban fantasy. When I actually started reading it, it felt more paranormal romance than urban fantasy. It took forever for the Norse mythology related plot to arrive, and even then the book seems more focused on the romance. The writing was decent and I could have pushed through to the end, but I didn’t see the point. I’d say the book’s okay just not what I was looking for.

A Lost Legacy: Awakening is an ARC I got through Netgalley. I only made it through the first chapter. How did this even get published? The writing is terrible, and the poor punctuation is being murdered. This is the first Netgalley ARC I’m quitting partway through, but there’s no way I could make it to the end of this one. The story also seemed to be filled to the brim with YA cliches, like the mysterious hot new guy to the most popular guy in school who likes the heroine for… reasons? Plus, the protagonist is Bella Swan clumsy. If those were the only issues, I would have tried more than the first chapter. Ultimately, it was the poor prose that did me in.

I made it 29% of the way through The Falconer by Elizabeth May. I know quitting was the right decision because I started smiling and humming to myself when I finally put it down. The Falconer isn’t offensively bad, it’s just “meh.” It’s a YA steampunk fantasy, but the steampunk elements feel tacked on and unnecessary. Then there’s the mandatory YA love triangle, which, of course, includes the standard immortal hottie. The Falconer feels like a bunch of YA tropes shoved together with nothing new enough to draw interest.

Delia’s Shadow by Jamie Lee Moyer is a historical paranormal novel that takes place in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century. I read a little over a hundred pages before deciding to quit. In all that time, the heroine made absolutely no actions or decisions. She was mainly just the passive recipient of whatever visions the ghost following her around decided to bestow on her. The narrative alternated between her first person sections and third person sections following the detective who’s clearly her love interest. So far the heroine’s sections felt mainly redundant, and I didn’t care enough to read until the end to find out if that changed. Neither of the main characters had much in the way in personality, and that combined with the lack of action made for a dull read.